I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

A definition in search of a word

We need a Sniglet to describe a new 21st century anxiety: That feeling you get when replying to an Evite which has already received several witty responses from your infinitely funnier and more talented friends, and you’re worried that you can’t come up with a witty enough response yourself.

Answers on a postcode, please.

I left my U+2665…

It’s approximately 26 hours since I touched down for my first ever trip to San Francisco. I leave in another 12.

How can it be that in this brief, brief time—just barely enough to wander around the Fisherman’s Wharf area, attend a meeting in a funky loftspace office, be driven up and down steep, steep hills, enjoy a couple of delicious expensed dinners and take a stroll down towards the Golden Gate—I’ve decided that I definitely want to live here some time before I die? (Or after. I’m not picky.)

It’s hit a chord with me in almost precisely the same way that Boston and Washington DC did, and New York and Chicago most certainly did not. The long-term goal is to some day escape to Alaska and telecommute, but SanFran is now edging out Seattle as the city I want us to move to in the next five-to-ten years.

If only they had an American League baseball team so we could still see the Sox play!

Everything but the Kitchen, Sync!

One of my favourite Firefox extensions is Bookmarks Synchronizer, a tool to sync up my bookmarks across my myriad of machines. I can spot something cool at work, bookmark it, then read it in my leisure time at home. (And never the other way around. I never spend my work hours mindlessly surfing, and you’d be a fool to think so).

Its main problem is its requirement for either a FTP site or a WebDAV folder to save your bookmarks to. I hastily and hackily enabled mod_dav on my Linux server, but was never terribly happy with that setup—It felt like an extra unattended door to my server.

Enter the new (and relatively unheralded) WebDAV autoversioning feature in Subversion 1.2. With just a minor tweak to your Subversion config, Bookmark Synchronizer can now write directly to your Subversion repository—Keeping a full history as it goes.

Over HTTPS and with mod_auth_pam(mod_auth_pam.c, pluggable authentication (PAM) for Apache), it’s about as secure as your bookmarks will ever need to be.

Dead Tree Cavalcade

Bah! Curse you, Keith.

I was going to state here that normally I avoid memes (what do you think this is? Bloody LiveJournal?), but I relented since a) as you follow all the links back, you discover that lots of people state “I normally don’t do this, but…”, so I’d be blindingly unoriginal, and b) I like books.

Total number of books I’ve owned: No idea. Over my lifetime, probably about 500 or so.

Last book I bought: Freakonomics, which I picked up on the strength of its brief review in Entertainment Weekly.

Last book I read: Currently next to the lavvy is Evan Dorkin’s compilation of his Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Adventures comics. I picked up a few of these comics back when they first came out (circa 1991), and really enjoyed them. Sadly, I’m not enjoying the reprint as much. Who would have thought that my tastes would have changed in the intervening fourteen years? Totally non-non-heinous.

Last book I finished: I read in quick succession a fairly well-linked threesome of All Marketers Are Liars, which makes reference to Blink, whose author is quoted on the cover of Freakonomics. All three give plenty of food for thought on the fact that there’s no such thing as “rational” human behaviour, and are recommended.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Puffin Novels)(Amazon.com: Books: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Puffin Novels)). You can stick yer Harry Potter up yer collective metaphorical arse. Roald Dahl is the finest childrens author of all time, and while Matilda, The Witches and The BFG are all superb, Charlie wins because it was the first one I read (or rather, had read to me). I still have my original copy, bought for me when I was 5 years old.

• Trainspotting. This was the book that reminded me how much fun reading could be, after five years of enforced dreadful dreary books at high school had sapped my will to read. I picked it up largely because it had a character called Begbie in it, and was engrossed. It’s not an easy read (even if you do know the Edinburgh accent), but it is worth it—The “Bad Blood” chapter in particular sticks in my mind. I read it over the summer of 1995, on the bus between Heriot Watt University and the branch of Comet where I worked, and haven’t re-read it since for fear that it won’t live up to my memory.

• The Bug. A fine, fine novel, and an incredibly deep investigation of the psyche of the software engineer.

• Joel on Software. Brilliant, humourous and perfectly opinionated writing on a myriad of different topics, important to anyone who shuffles bits around buses for a living. It helps you understand what’s going on inside both your computer and your co-workers.

• The copy of High Fidelity(Amazon.com: Books: High Fidelity (Movie-tie In) : A Novel) that I borrowed from Joy the night I met her, and have never returned. Or read, for that matter.

People upon whom I wish to inflict this brain-wrackery:

• Joy
• TC
• Dan
• Mark F
• Yoz

In your own time, chaps.